


Of Truth and Consequences

by just_a_velleity



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Astronomy, M/M, non-explicit johnlock, some language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-03
Updated: 2013-03-03
Packaged: 2017-12-04 03:36:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/706070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_a_velleity/pseuds/just_a_velleity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John's voice is apparently... soothing to Sherlock, so he reads to him. </p><p>Inspired by purpleandorangesheep's lovely drawing here: http://purpleandorangesheep.tumblr.com/post/44063419388/sometimes-sherlock-will-cuddle-with-john-and</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Truth and Consequences

Life at 221B could be described by any number of adjectives, some more explicit than others, but dull was not one of them.

John, for one, was happy about that. His limp had been replaced by pure adrenaline and the thrill of working with the world’s only consulting detective.  Speed-of-light deductions and sarcastic asides were the man’s signature, and that coat made him look like something out of a Dickens novel. Of course, living with Sherlock did have its pitfalls. There were middle-of-the-night awakenings and mysterious stains on the coffee table, and John had gained a more thorough knowledge of classical music than he’d ever wanted to obtain.

Of all things, it was wrapped in Semtex, sniper sights trained on him, that he realized he wouldn’t trade this life for anything. Everyone else be damned, midnight explosions and soaring violin sonatas came to define _home_ for John.

Sherlock, though. Sherlock was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma if there ever was one. He managed to be the most absolutely brilliant and frustrating man you’d ever met, often in the span of two sentences. He could tell your life story from the insteps of your shoes but was apparently incapable of walking two blocks to get the milk.

He was blindingly intelligent, so much so that he needed a mind palace for the sheer amount of information his brain contained. He would have made a miserable encyclopedia, though, what with the lack of entries for things like the solar system. John had been shocked to find out that Sherlock thought this tenet of elementary science education was unimportant, and he teased him over that for weeks.

\---

Sherlock needed the work to keep him manageably sane—it had only been three days since solving the Haverford murders and he was pacing the flat, muttering something that sounded like “too slow”. The only man in the world who would wish for serial murderers, and John had chosen to live with him.

Sherlock had apparently channeled the nervous energy into insulting anything and everything, including John —he wouldn’t quit making snide remarks about his dime-store paperback thrillers. John finally went out and bought _A Beginner’s Guide to Astronomy_ out of sheer spite. It was raining like mad, but it would be worth it to see Sherlock’s reaction.

He sat in the armchair reading triumphantly and waiting for Sherlock, who was currently in a tussle with a stubborn Erlenmeyer flask, to notice. The bloody exasperating man, he had surely already noticed and was just ignoring him. That, or he’d deleted the information. He had a massively pesky habit of deleting things he deemed irrelevant, but he seemed to have a special talent for deleting household information—John was forever finding test tubes in alarming shades of green in the cupboard along with the cereal.

Minutes ticked by, and John turned the pages a little more insistently. Sherlock’s patience for science was inexhaustible—for people, less so. Finally, he glanced up.

“Something on your mind?” he said, just enough of a smirk on his face for John to notice.

God, he was infuriating.

John went back to his book with a stubborn persistence. Something about the atmospheric composition of Venus, but he wasn’t paying enough attention to really know.

He was drifting off into a daydream about the desert sun when Sherlock appeared in his peripheral vision. Zero sense of personal space, that man had.

“What are you reading?”

“A book.”

“Yes, I’d observed that, thank you.”

“It’s an astronomy book. Were you aware that the Earth revolves around a star known as the Sun?”

“Yes, John, you made quite sure to tell me that before, I thought that was clear. I did save that bit of information this time, if it will placate you.”

“Congratulations, Sherlock. You will be permitted to graduate to Year 3.”

“Oh, shut up. Is this about my comments on your literary taste? You really could stand to read something a bit more useful, you know.”

John tilted up the cover of his book in response.

“This is useful.”

“Whatever suits you.”

He returned to whatever it was he was experimenting on—John had ceased to ask when the answer more often than not involved human body parts. Sherlock had never really been one for properly ending conversations.

John returned to his book. It actually was sort of interesting, especially the bits with the pictures taken by satellites. He remembered some of it from the physical science classes he’d had to take at the beginning of med school. Why they had thought knowing about asteroids would be helpful in setting bones, John had never understood.

He didn’t know how much later it was when he glanced up to find Sherlock staring at him intently.

“Ah, good. Will you read to me?”

“Read to you?”

“Yes, John. You haven’t suddenly gone deaf, have you?”

“No. But you’re not exactly the bedtime-stories type, especially not with something so _trifling_ as astronomy.”

“It helps me think,” he said quietly.

John shrugged.

“Alright, if that’s what you want.”

He began to read, meandering through the solar system from Mars to Neptune, skipping paragraphs when Sherlock shouted “Boring!”

John continued in his steady, gentle voice, but he couldn’t focus. His eyes kept drifting over to Sherlock, who was draped over the sofa, listening raptly. He was truly a puzzle. Some days, John felt like a prop to make Sherlock look taller or to carry the gun; some days they were giggling at crime scenes and calling for Chinese, and then there were days like this. It could be infuriating, the way John’s words seemed to go straight through Sherlock sometimes. Astronomy, of all things, finally got him to listen.

It was when John got up to make tea, voice sore, that he realized.

Sherlock had fallen asleep.

He could be so perfectly still that sometimes it was difficult to tell, but this was unmistakably sleep. Impossibly tucked up into himself on the sofa, there was a vulnerability to the angle of his shoulders and the tilt of his neck that Sherlock refused to let show in the daytime. John felt an inexplicable urge to tuck a blanket over him.

\---

If Sherlock thought there was something off the next morning, he gave no indication of it. It was like nothing had ever happened—John handed him his tea and he nodded, already absorbed in the crime section.

It affected John more than it should have. He wasn’t even sure he knew what _it_ was, but he found himself looking up from his laptop every so often, searching for Sherlock, keeping him within reach. He never said anything, just buried that dark head into the microscope viewer, muttering incoherently about blood types.

Having given up on Sherlock ever doing the expected thing, John sat down that night with his Clancy paperback.  They never could get the chase scenes right, but it took him out of reality for a while.

When he felt the sofa shift, John looked up in surprise. Sherlock was perched on the end, looking expectantly at John.

“Read to me?”

So this was supposed to become a habit, or something. John found sometimes it was better not to question, so he started in.

“No, no, no! Not that rubbish. Get the space book.”

“All of a sudden you’re interested?” John remarked drily. Sherlock only gave him a petulant look, so he went to pull _A Beginner’s Guide to Astronomy_ off the shelf and began to read.

Sherlock was clearly agitated about something or other, because he couldn’t keep still for the life of him. He kept changing positions, and finally settled with his long legs flung over John’s lap. John sighed, but there wasn’t any getting the detective to compromise on matters like these.

It was when Sherlock’s curls brushed against John’s shoulder that he was truly thrown.

“Sherlock?”

“Mmm?”

“What are you doing?”

“I need to think, you’re comfortable…”

He trailed off like it was obvious.

Obvious couldn’t have been further from the truth.

John kept reading, but he was painfully aware of every breath, every tiny shift he made so as not to disturb Sherlock’s head on his shoulder. When his breathing finally settled into the quiescent rhythm of sleep, John relaxed. He carefully shut the book and laid Sherlock gently on the sofa.

John walked up the steps to his bedroom with an odd feeling in his chest, wondering how the hell _that_ had come about.

\---

And then it happened.

A flash of black, a slow crimson slash, and a prisoner’s last phone call were all it took to shatter John’s world.

He wandered about in a daze for weeks—missing surgeries, leaving tea to go cold on the mantle. Mrs. Hudson worried after him incessantly, but this wasn’t the kind of thing herbal soothers were going to fix.

After a few days of lying to himself, he went and got his cane down out of the closet.

Little remnants of Sherlock were everywhere—an underlined bit of newspaper stuck to the mirror, the skull taunting him from above the fireplace. Even the goddamned sun had to remind him. That stupid bloody brilliant man who was so blisteringly arrogant as to think the sun was insignificant.

It sort of was.

\---

It was only once Sherlock was gone that John realized just how tied together their lives were. He got up in the mornings and made two cups of tea out of habit, only to throw one down the drain with a tremor in his hand.

He picked up the paper, skimming the crime section for anything interesting. When he saw the unsolved double murder, he found himself turning to an empty chair.

John threw the crime section into the recycling bin.

The international news, he thought, would be safer. Until the whole front page was taken up by the discovery of a new asteroid.

They should have named it after him. They should have named the whole fucking universe after him.

\--

It got to be just too much, so John canceled the paper. He regretted the decision the next morning when he sat at the table, staring out blankly with nothing but his thoughts to distract him.

God knows _they_ didn’t do any good.

In search of something to read, John went over to Sherlock’s bookshelves, but he just couldn’t do it. He choked up running his fingers over the spines and finally picked up some magazine of Mrs. Hudson’s just to make the tightness in his chest go away.

He found little reminders everywhere he looked. It was as if Mycroft had expanded his self-styled empire beyond Britain and was using it to inform John at every opportunity that Sherlock was agonisingly, irreparably _gone_.

He did make a valiant effort, he really did. Going out with Mike for drinks, socialising at the hospital—but he could never feel entirely there. It was as if some central part of him was trapped at 221B, his heart held hostage.

He even made an attempt at dating. She was a nice, pretty girl, Alice, from the hospital, who told him she wanted to surprise him.

When they arrived at the planetarium John tried his very best to ooh and aah with her over the stars, but Sherlock was just so inextricably tied up in those flaming, glittering orbs that he couldn’t take it.

He dropped Alice off at her house just after 10 with a half-hearted try at an apologetic smile.

She didn’t call again.

\---

As the months passed by, the reality finally started to sink in. He wasn’t coming back.

John finally learned not to reach for the second teacup, and breakfast with Mrs. Hudson made him feel not quite so alone. He still woke up sweating and terrified at night, just steps from crying out, but he figured out how to hide the circles under his eyes.

He worked ever more hours, drowning himself in sterile white walls and silver instruments to the point where he almost managed to forget.

\---

The day John arrived home to find Sherlock sprawled out on the sofa he nearly fainted.

“Hello, John.”

John blinked and pinched himself.

“I’m dreaming. This is all some twisted, masochistic dream.”

“No, John, I’m very much alive,” Sherlock said, reaching out and touching John’s shoulder to prove it.

John tensed.

“Sherlock, you bastard! What are you doing here? You left me alone, you said nothing, you abandoned me here with nothing but Skull for company! What the _hell_ do you think gives you the right to walk back in here just when I’m _finally_ figuring out how to do this?”

Sherlock just sat there and took the abuse as John shouted at him, waiting for it to end. Eventually, having run out of either energy or curses, John trailed off.

“That wasn’t quite the welcome I’d expected.”

“Bloody well right it wasn’t,” John shot back.

\---

The whole thing was rather surreal, and John kept expecting to wake up from some sort of dream, but Sherlock showed up to breakfast without fail, cutting remarks and all.

He didn’t get it, though. This was almost worse than if he’d stayed gone. It was as if John’s heart had been ripped apart and then sewn back together by the world’s most incompetent surgeon. Sherlock seemed to think he could just waltz elegantly back in and resume his detective work, and he didn’t understand why John didn’t feel the same way.

“John, there’s a _case_!” he said, the kind of excitement in his voice that he reserved only for exceptionally talented murderers.

“You know I have work.”

“Fine.”

Sherlock stalked out of the flat in a huff, only making John angrier. How on earth could Sherlock be the one mad at _John_ over this?

\---

Finally, one day, it got to be too much.

“John, please. I need your help.”

“What could you possibly need me for? You seem to be functioning just fine on your own.”

“John. You know that’s not true. I can’t…” he trailed off.

“Can’t what? The mighty Sherlock Holmes can’t do something?”

“Look, John. I can’t comfort the families; I can’t hit a moving target from fifty meters down the block. You _know_ I’m awful at talking to people, John. I need you.”

For just a fraction of a second, Sherlock looked so terribly _lost_ that John couldn’t help but say yes.

Out on the darkened streets, caught up in a chase, following on instinct the snap of the coat around a corner, it hit John like a brick wall just how much he missed this life.

It was only when they returned to 221B, out of breath and laughing, that John noticed his cane leaning against the stairway.

\---

They settled back into a comfortable rhythm. Well, as comfortable as chasing after serial killers in the middle of the night could be. It wasn’t quite the same as before—John would occasionally look up to find Sherlock staring at him, looking amazed that he was still there. No, it would never be quite the same, John decided, but this was as close to happy as he’d ever been.

\---

In all those months away, though, it seemed Sherlock hadn’t picked up any sense of privacy or decorum.

John woke to a persistent tapping on his shoulder and opened his eyes, blearily protesting.

“Bloody hell, Sherlock, it’s 3 in the morning. What are you doing?”

“Can’t sleep.”

“Count sheep. Go make tea. Why do you need to sleep, anyway? I thought that was for mere mortals.”

“It’s affecting… my work, John.”

“Well, _you’re_ affecting my sleep.”

“Will you… read to me?”

He offered the book with a look John almost would have called apologetic if it hadn’t been Sherlock.

“Oh, fine, you insomniac idiot. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

John tugged on a jumper—Sherlock always kept it so _cold_ in the flat—and headed downstairs.

Sherlock was pacing the room from end to end, ruffling his hair and gesturing wildly. John found it fascinating to watch him like this, enveloped in his mind palace, utterly oblivious to the outside world. It was a gift and a curse, to be as talented as he was, and in the moment John could see both.

It _was_ the middle of the night, though, so John cleared his throat.

“Oh, perfect. Thank you, John,” he said, gesturing for him to pick up the book left on the table.

_A Beginner’s Guide to Astronomy._

Oh, he _would_ have. John chuckled quietly to himself at the stupid little book that had become an inside joke of sorts between the two of them.

“Begin with the supernova section, would you? I believe that’s where you left off.”

Of all the things for him to remember.

 “A supernova is a highly luminous stellar explosion that occurs when…”

As John read, Sherlock looked markedly less agitated. This was how it usually worked—if you could get the gears in his mind to just slow down a bit, he was able to focus. It was almost like his mind became a separate entity sometimes, threatening to run away from his body if he didn’t keep up.

Sherlock didn’t curl up in the armchair to sleep as usual, though.

John startled a bit when Sherlock sat down next to him on the sofa and tucked his head into John’s chest. He had gotten used to Sherlock’s lack of sense of personal space, but this felt different, somehow, almost tender. It felt… like  _home_.

“You can continue, you know.”

Pushing away the million thoughts that were threatening to discombobulate him, John kept reading. He couldn’t shake the feeling, though. This wasn’t the puzzlement he had felt before—he wasn’t uncomfortable or nervous, but he could feel his pulse racing under Sherlock’s cheek.

“Stop,” Sherlock whispered. Everything the man did was intense, even before-dawn whispers.

John looked up to find Sherlock staring at him, something foreign in those impossibly deep eyes.

“You’re not doing this to focus,” John said. It was less of an accusation than a statement.

“Took you long enough.”

Sherlock reached up to pull John towards him, and it only took John a fraction of a second to realize how long he’d wanted this. Sherlock’s kisses were tentative at first, a quick dry kiss that left John's head spinning before he pulled back. When he saw the smile on John’s face, though, he knew. The kisses became more insistent as Sherlock pulled him closer and John worked his fingers into Sherlock’s dark curls. It was wonderful and nerve-wracking and John felt like he was throwing himself off a cliff but somehow knew he'd be safe. Sherlock kissed like he moved, all poetry and intense elegance.

They ended up curled into each other on the sofa, Sherlock’s head tucked under John’s chin and John’s arm around Sherlock’s shoulders. They stayed there, the occasional contented sigh the only sound until the sun broke over London and the city resumed its bustling life. It was a declaration better than any words would have been.

“You know, I never really wanted to fall asleep anyway.”

Sherlock had always been one step ahead of him.

**Author's Note:**

> My second fic, inspired by purpleandorangesheep's lovely drawing here: http://purpleandorangesheep.tumblr.com/post/44063419388/sometimes-sherlock-will-cuddle-with-john-and
> 
> Not yet britpicked, much appreciate you correcting any mistakes.
> 
> tumblr: just-a-velleity


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